I'm less concerned about supporting the a&&hole because there are
thousands of non-a&&holes that work for him that I am supporting.
EVERY company has at least one a&&hole that I can make an argument
that would violate my purity test.
So, regarding the Starlink antenna situation. The important thing to
consider is that for those of us in the northern hemisphere, the most
important section of sky is to the north. I know that seems
counter-intuitive, but the way orbital mechanics work, the satellites
sorta arc around the sky from west to north and back down to east.
Southern hemisphere is the opposite, with the prime "viewing" to the
south. There is a point where this is currently not entirely true, and
as I live in Alaska, the suggestion of the northern sky is laughable
because most of them are to our south. But it's usually best to tilt
it to the north and have better northern exposure.
That said, the latest updates over the past couple of months have
added predictive loss-of-signal and will switch to another satellite
BEFORE the signal is lost due to obstruction. It takes a couple of
days before it has sufficiently learned all the obstructions and how
to apply the predictive satellite switching. The update from a couple
weeks ago has turned mine into a nearly perfect, zero loss, system
even though my sky coverage looks like a cat's eye with about 1/3 of
the sky unencumbered.
Mine is the 50GB per month roaming plan (with the 3rd gen antenna). I
got it so I can go explore the wilds of Alaska and stay "connected."
Cell coverage gets spotty once you leave civilization. Well, it can be
spotty even while you are still in civilization!
For those wondering, pretty much every city of substance has a
Starlink earth-station. It's pretty interesting to see how the network
is setup. As the satellites fly overhead, your signal is effectively
bounced from your antenna to the satellite, to the very nearest earth
station where it then is routed over fiber-optic network to their
nearest data center. So if you are in, say Seattle, you are connecting
to the satellites flying over Seattle, and downlinking directly to
Seattle and then to the Seattle data center. The latency is very
little and the connection remains effectively local. They do have
satellite to satellite laser communications which does allow for
extending the downlink two or more satellites away and that's used
more often for coverage over oceans.
As my particular job in telecom happens to deal with this and other
non-terrestrial communications systems, I can say, without hesitation,
that not only is there no other system that comes close to being as
good (on so many levels) as Starlink, but it is constantly evolving
and improving. I did get whacked by one major outage, but sheesh, show
me ANY terrestrial telecom network that hasn't had a major outage.
AG Schnozz
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